“Biased and bigoted views,” you say?

“This is the United States of America — for centuries, people fled to our shores to find refuge from religious persecution. All Americans of faith should take a long, hard look at this and decide if these are the values we want to be represented in our next president. If Hillary Clinton continues to employ people with biased and bigoted views, it’s clear where her priorities lie.”

This is an actual statement from the highest-ranking Republican in America. The same man who has affirmed that, as of this posting, he still plans to vote for his party’s nominee, Donald Trump, even if he won’t actively campaign for or with him. Donald Trump, lest you forget, bragged about committing sexual assault and called for a ban on all Muslim immigrants. Then there was the incredible moment when he said that a judge born in Indiana couldn’t rule on a Trump University lawsuit because he was Mexican. Remember that? Do you remember that Paul Ryan denounced Trump’s racist remarks as “textbook racism”? Then as now, Ryan supported Trump for president.

Let me be clear.

Paul Ryan is, at best, a craven coward with utterly no sense of shame or decency. If he had shame, decency, or the courage of his convictions, he never would have endorsed Donald Trump as his party’s presidential nominee. At the very least, he would have un-endorsed Trump back when he correctly identified Trump’s textbook racism for what it is. At that point, Ryan could have secured his reputation as a man of principle and conscience. It’s too late. I suspect that Ryan knows that it’s too late, which is why he has apparently resolved himself to stay the course, even though he sees the iceberg looming over the bow.

At worst, Paul Ryan is a racist, misogynist, religiously bigoted thug who tacitly approves every noxious effusion spewed by his candidate, Donald J. Trump. In which case, of course, he’s very principled, but his principles are those of hatred, resentment, fear, and utterly amoral self-interest.

We are talking, in either case, about an elected official who continues to give his support–publicly and willingly–to a man who has bragged about committing sexual assault.

In that context, I find it to be quite rich indeed that Paul Ryan would denounce Hillary Clinton and her political allies for expressing views on the Catholic Church that he considers to be “biased and bigoted.” He continues to support for president a man who in his words and actions has violated the spirit of the Christianity (let alone Catholicism specifically) for the entirety of his public life. In his presidential campaign, he has doubled and tripled down on most of those violations.

It is a commonplace to accuse politicians of hypocrisy. It is also often done quite uncharitably and without consideration of either the foibles of human nature or the vicissitudes of circumstance. For me, this is not a “gotcha!” thing. This, to me, cuts instead to the core of what a diseased monstrosity the conservative-Republican alliance has become.

Read that quote at the top of this post again. Paul Ryan is trying to drum up animus against one candidate by invoking the “biased and bigoted views” of those she employs because he wants people to come out and vote for his candidate, the one whose entire campaign has been one interminable, inarticulate howl containing multitudes of every form of ignorant bias and cruel bigotry. How dare he impugn the values of Hillary Clinton when he himself has utterly abandoned the values of his own faith to pimp for the racist, amoral sexual predator at the top of his own party’s ticket? And how can anybody ever again call Paul Ryan a man of principle, unless what they mean is that he’s a man dedicated wholly and without scruple to the principle of retaining political power at any cost to his own soul or the soul of the nation he claims to serve?